


I'd Only Ever Kissed Boys Before

by freelancejouster



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: Biphobia, Compulsory Heterosexuality, F/F, Friends to Lovers, Gay Awakening, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Practice Kissing, Practice dating, experimenting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:13:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29687238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freelancejouster/pseuds/freelancejouster
Summary: Rory and Lane read an article about compulsory heterosexuality and start to wonder if they're gay -- and if maybe they should date.  Just to see.
Relationships: Rory Gilmore/Lane Kim
Kudos: 7





	I'd Only Ever Kissed Boys Before

**Author's Note:**

> title is a reference to "Touch-A, Touch-A, Touch Me" from The Rocky Horror Picture Show :)
> 
> happy birthday ari; i'm only about a month late. lane kim deserved better.
> 
> my approach to canon here specifically is that everything that happened up until early season 4 happened, and then I completely ignored the rest of it; also I think I moved up some of the references for this to be set around 2010/2012 when I was starting college. There's some joking, both aloud and in text, that is homophobic, in the way that would have been acceptable in the setting/on the show. I made those choices on purpose, as a bisexual woman, but please don't read if that will bother you!
> 
> (I have not really edited this; sorry if there's some nonsense).

October in Stars Hollow had never been anything less than idyllic. Autumn foliage in bright reds and oranges and yellows dotted every available surface. Doose’s market was having a sale on turnips, as Taylor had read somewhere that they were the “original jack o’ lanterns” and was using that as an excuse to not have a sale on pumpkins. There was a near-constant soundtrack of “Touch-A, Touch-A, touch Me” playing in the town square by way of the open door to Miss Patty’s dance studio, as she taught her middle grade students a number for Rocky Horror Picture Show — which some might not have appreciated, but Rory thought only added to the ambiance.

She’d come home for the weekend to see her mom a little and get some studying in a friendly place, and had set up shop in the gazebo, but she’d gotten frustrated with her Greek History textbook about thirty minutes ago and had opted for the autobiography she’d packed along instead.

“That doesn’t look like studying,” Lane remarked, footsteps sounding up the short staircase.

“You caught me,” Rory said with a grin, happy to see her friend.

“Is that any good?” Lane asked, sitting down beside her. She looked cute today, Rory observed, even if she’d just gotten off her shift at Luke’s — the cutesy pink cardigan she seemed to have chosen as her uniform thrown over a Sonic Youth t-shirt that was just a little bit destroyed, hair half up in a pair of small ponytails.

“I like it so far,” Rory said, accepting the coffee Lane proffered and taking a sip. “I’m not sure what to think about it — I don’t think I’ve thought about, like, that sort of thing before, you know?”

“That sort of thing?”

Rory grimaced. She felt weird saying it out loud, like she should be more advanced as a person than this — but it was just Lane. She could tell Lane anything. “The, you know, gay thing,” she said, feeling stupid.

“You’ve never thought about gay people or you’ve never thought about being gay?” Lane asked. She grabbed for the book to look at the back cover.

“I mean, I’ve totally thought about gay people before, and I, like, I’m _not_ gay, I’ve had boyfriends, but I’ve never really read someone’s first person experiences like she talks about in this book.”

“You can be gay and have had boyfriends, though,” Lane said, pulling a leg up to her chest to get comfortable on the bench. “It could have just been compulsory heterosexuality.”

“Who did you hear ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ from?” Rory asked with a laugh.

“Read about it in a magazine,” Lane said, waggling her eyebrows as she handed the book back. “Maybe that’s you — or like, bisexuals are a thing.”

“Mom told me once that she thought bisexuals were selfish,” Rory said, remembering. It had been a bit. “I thought it was kind of funny at the time.”

“She sounds like _my_ mom,” Lane said with a little laugh. It might have been nothing — but Rory thought she sounded just a little bit sad. “Can I borrow it when you finish?” Lane asked. She took a sip from the cup she’d brought along for herself. Some sort of floral tea by the smell of it.

“Yeah, of course. I’m about done here, did you want to show me the new song you’re working on?” Rory asked, already packing up.

“Yes!” Lane said decisively, getting to her feet and taking another long sip of her tea. She picked up Rory’s coffee cup for her so she could finish getting her books together more efficiently. “Your mom seems to like it so far, she said it reminded her of Blondie, which I don’t really get, but I understand is a compliment from her.”

“It is, I’m pretty sure there was a good three weeks during middle school where we listened to Parallel Lines on repeat. I still know all the words to Pretty Baby,” Rory said.

“Now that’s impressive — now that you mention it, I think I remember that period. She was going through a rough break up, huh?” Lane said with a little laugh.

“She never said it, but I was always pretty sure that’s what it was, yeah,” Rory said, stacking the last of her things into her arms. She took her coffee cup back from Lane and took a sip before starting down the steps. “Speaking of, how are you doing with the whole Dave thing?”

“We talked on the phone the other day, but it really doesn’t feel fair to expect anything of him at this point,” Lane said, shrugging a shoulder. “I mean, he’s in _California_ going to college, do I expect him to pay any mind to the ridiculously sheltered Korean girl from a tiny east coast town that he happened to have kissed a couple times? Not really. It wasn’t like _really_ a break up, but it might as well have been.”

“I hate that,” Rory said, frowning.

“Me too,” Lane said. “How are you doing with Jess?”

“Oh, you know,” Rory said. “The same. Boys suck.”

“They do!” Lane said with a little laugh. There was a short lull as they crossed the street together, and Rory almost started to ask her about how her shift had gone, but then Lane said, “Maybe your author has the right idea — maybe we should date girls.”

“You’re not serious?” Rory asked.

“Why not?”

“Because we’ve only ever liked guys?” Rory offered. She took another sip of her coffee — it was very good. She wondered if Luke had made it, or if Lane had made it “Don’t you think I would have liked a girl by now, if I liked girls?”

“Maybe you just _think_ you like guys because you’ve been told your whole life that liking guys was _the_ option, and so you’re not able to recognize your own attraction to girls,” Lane said, animatedly.

“That article really got you worked up, huh?” Rory asked.

“I don’t know, I think combined with the whole Dave thing, like — I’ve felt different than my mom wanted me to be, like, my entire life, right? And a lot of what I feel when I’m interested in a guy is like, anxiety about my mom finding out,” Lane said with a wry little laugh. She ran a hand down her face. “It’s like messing with me a little bit, the thought that I might not know myself because of these societal expectations.”

“I mean, I think I know you plenty, if that helps at all,” Rory said.

“It does a little.”

It wasn’t something Rory had ever really thought about, she realized, as they turned the last corner before her house. She remembered her mom teasing her about being friends with boys in elementary school — maybe Rory had just taken her queues from that and the rest of the world telling her that she was supposed to be interested in boys.

It shouldn’t have bothered her, but it did.

They waved to Babette and Maury who were out on their front porch, rearranging their potted plants. Both gave enthusiastic waves and Babette tried to get them to come over and see them. Rory emphasized the stack of books she was carrying. Lane pointed at her watch. They escaped inside without even slowing down.

“Is your mom home?” Lane asked, heading for the kitchen like she was perfectly at home there — which was probably true. She’d been a feature in the house off and on for as long as Rory could remember, but she’d also been spending additional time there lately to practice with the band and also just not be at her own house where her classmates from Adventist college knew where to find her. 

“I think she’s over at Sookie’s,” Rory said, dropping all her books in a pile on the couch and then following Lane. “We’re supposed to meet up here for a late lunch.” Lane was stood on her tiptoes to fish a bag of potato chips down from the cupboards. “Ooh, bring the Twizzlers too.” 

“Ever think about helping me out here?” Lane asked with a little laugh, arm stretched as high as physically possible.

“I hadn’t, but I can,” Rory laughed, crossing the room to pull the bag down for them. Maybe it — maybe it was the conversation they’d been having earlier, but a proximity that should have been more or less mundane for how often they’d been in similar situations, felt very nearly electrically charged as Rory realized how close Lane’s face was to hers. Lane’s fingers curled over the edge of the Twizzlers bag, an expression on her face like maybe she was feeling something else too, and it. Rory wondered if she shouldn’t —

Lane turned away, taking the snacks with her to head out the kitchen door. “So this song I’m working on, it’s not done yet but I really like it so far. It’s like the first thing I’ve worked on that feels really like the _band_ post-Dave. Which, by the way, I think makes us really interesting, having a former lead guitarist leave.”

“Yeah, I think it’ll be good, too,” Rory heard herself say, no thought behind it. She felt just a little bit out of it, like she’d drank too much pool water. “Add to your lore or something.”

“Exactly!”

—

Rory became aware that Lane had stopped playing only when she started waving her hand in front of her face.

“Rory!” Lane said, nearly laughing at how monumentally spaced out Rory had been. And that was fair.

She’d been thinking — too hard, apparently — about what exactly it might be like to be attracted to a woman. She’d always liked how _solid_ the boys she’d kissed had been beside her — how Dean was so warm and present, how Jess had been coiled like a spring. Maybe — maybe a woman would be softer. Maybe that would be nice.

“Sorry,” Rory said with a smile. And then, “Can you find out what magazine it was that that article was in?”

Lane’s eyebrows tented a little. “The compulsory heterosexuality one?”

Rory nodded. She thought she might have caught just the ghost of a smile on Lane’s face.

—

By the time she walked into her dorm room that Thursday to find a large manila envelope in the small stack of mail Janet had thrown on her bed, Rory had more or less forgotten about the article and the strange conversations she’d had with Lane over the weekend.

She glanced through her credit card bill, a letter from a friend, and a flyer for twenty percent off at a makeup store she’d ducked in once in town, before opening the envelope to find a magazine she didn’t recognize. Glancing at the from address reminded her, though, when she saw Lane’s name there in her careful handwriting.

Her heart started beating a little harder, hands growing clammy. It felt taboo almost to hold, knowing the contents. Literature seemed to fit in a different category somehow, and besides that she’d never really _held_ anything explicitly gay before. Rory had half an urge to shove it between her mattress and frame, or maybe into a dresser drawer or something.

But she was also curious. And Paris was in lab for another hour or so. So Rory shut the door to her room, half-waving at Tana who was sat in the living room taking careful notes on nothing in particular.

The magazine wasn’t anything special — there was nothing that would have made her guess at the content with its cover of a pretty woman in her mid-twenties, who Rory didn’t recognize, sitting on a bench in front of a park-scene. The title was innocuous. They’d chosen not to go with article blurbs. Rory wondered a little bit what had made Lane pick the magazine up at all.

To say that she devoured the magazine was an understatement. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but inside it she found little slices of fiction and memoir, product recommendations, fashion recommendations, and there, in the third quarter, a pair of longer think pieces — one about biphobia that the author felt was ingrained in the community, and the other the one about compulsory heterosexuality.

Before she knew what she was doing, she called Lane — and after confirming that it was Lane on the phone rather than her mother, she said, “Maybe we should date girls.”

“Momma, I’m just going to take this upstairs,” she heard Lane say. And then, “It’s Rory, Momma,” and then the sound of Lane’s feet on the stairs. And then, as Lane closed the door to her bedroom, “What did you just say to me on the phone in front of my mother?”

Rory grinned. “That maybe we should date girls.”

“Just to see, right? Like what if we’re missing something? How will we know otherwise?”

“Exactly,” Rory said. She could picture Lane in her room, the way she might be laying on the bed or pacing the room. “I feel like maybe this isn’t the conclusion we were supposed to reach from that article, though. Like maybe we’ve taken it a step too far.”

Lane made a dismissive noise. “Everyone else who read that article was gay already. Maybe we’re the only people who read it who needed to read it.”

“Maybe,” Rory allowed. And then, “Where would we even find girls to date?”

“You live in a college town,” Lane reminded her. “Are there any gay bars? Queer coffee houses?”

“I don’t know,” Rory admitted. “I haven’t really been paying attention to that sort of thing.”

“Rory!” Lane complained. 

“I’m sorry! I really just go to the cafeteria, the paper, the library, and to class and then back home. If I want different food, I get take out, I don’t go wandering around the city looking for it.”

“That would be too inefficient,” Lane noted.

“Exactly,” Rory agreed. She thought for a little bit before saying, “I guess I’m not even sure who I could ask. I could ask around a little at the newspaper maybe, but it feels like one of those things you’re just supposed to know.”

“I know what you mean, but I have even less options than you, here,” Lane said, sounding a little discouraged. Rory could hear her shifting around for a moment and then. “I mean, we could start with dating each other.”

“Lane!” Rory protested. Something about the words made her heart beat harder, a little burst of additional anxiety making her feel too warm in her usually drafty dorm room. She struggled for a moment to find the words she was looking for, before settling on, “You’re not, like —”

“No, I don’t suggest this because I have some secret long-harbored crush on you, I was just thinking — like, I don’t know. I trust you to be honest if I’m a bad date or whatever.”

Rory wasn’t sure. “What if it wrecks our friendship or something.” She felt like she always heard that as a reason for friends not to date.

Lane scoffed at that. “Are you telling me that you don’t think our friendship can’t survive a couple of measly dates?”

Rory laughed at that — anxiety subsiding a little. If it was a bad idea, they’d be able to figure it out afterwards, Lane was probably right. There was still something that felt a little like anxiety deep in her stomach, but it was probably just around these new thoughts in general. “No, I guess not,” she said.

“Good,” Lane said. And then, “So it’s a date?”

“Yes,” Rory nodded and grinned, even though Lane couldn’t see her. It’s a date.

—

They made the plans over email across the next few days. They were going to do a late lunch picnic, because that felt like a gay thing to do, on Saturday. Rory would pick Lane up and they’d go to the park between Stars Hollow and Woodbridge, because it wasn’t too far away but it was _pretty_ likely they wouldn’t run into people from town there who might make them self-conscious about what they were doing. They planned to dress up a little, to make it feel special.

Rory may or may not have stared at every piece of clothing in her closet trying to figure out how to dress up a little on a gay date. Were the rules the same? Did she even have anything that looked gay? Was “dressed up a little” even the same thing for gay people? Was she meant to dress gay?

She settled on a soft cream cardigan over a cute camisole she might have worn on a date in other circumstances, and a pair of fitted jeans that she’d always liked. It seemed to hit that in between space she was going for. She drove to the little deli just off campus and picked up a few different types of their small, artisan sandwiches, a little charcuterie board kit, a mini cheesecake, and a pair of lemonades for their picnic. Lane was bringing a blanket for them to sit on.

As she drove to Stars Hollow to pick Lane up, Rory kept waiting for part of herself to be nervous. She was going on a first date after all — while she wasn’t prone to Paris-level, blowing into a paper bag, type anxiety around dating, she’d usually get butterflies or something before the _event_.

Another part of herself was sort of waiting to find it weird or strange that it was _Lane_ she was about to pick up for a date.

And maybe it was a little. They’d known each other since they were in Kindergarten together; she’d never thought of her as a romantic interest before now, so maybe it was silly that they were trying this at all. But it was also — well, she was mostly looking forward to it. 

Maybe she found _that_ a little weird. But also, if she kept thinking about it she’d get caught in that sort of logic forever and never actually make it to the date. Which would be bad because she was pulling up a block over from the Kim’s where Lane had asked her to pick her up — a sort of dating tradition, Rory knew, from every other date Lane had been on that she knew her mother wouldn’t approve of — which Rory was definitely true was a bucket she’d fit into. It was fine. She was in mostly good company.

Rory put the car in park and wondered if she was early, as she didn’t see Lane anywhere, but then she popped out from behind a tree in a variation of what she usually wore to work, a blanket tucked under one arm, and a large purse in the other.

“Fancy seeing you here,” Rory joked, as Lane climbed into the back seat.

“Go, go, go!” Lane said, waving her forward.

Rory laughed and drove off, careful to take the route out of town that passed furthest from the Kim’s. “What are you doing in the back seat?”

“I’m going to change once we get out of town, it seemed easier to do in the back seat — I couldn’t wear the outfit I wanted to out of the house without my mom getting suspicious; she’d have been all _Lane, you cannot go out looking like that_ , and _Lane, you will never find a husband dressed like that_ ,” Lane said, going into an impressive impersonation of her mother’s voice.

“How scandalous is this outfit we’re talking about?” Rory asked, looking back to raise her eyebrows at her.

“It’s not even that scandalous, I just — “ Rory couldn’t see her, but she could picture what Lane’s face might look like at that pause, maybe just a little bit determined; maybe just a little blushed, especially given that the next words were, “ — wanted to look nice for our date.”

“That’s very sweet, but you didn’t have to inconvenience yourself!”

“Oh, it wasn’t an inconvenience,” Lane said. She sounded very matter-of-fact and Rory couldn’t find it in herself to be anything other than just a little bit pleased. “Incorporating this blanket into my cover story, that was a little inconvenient, but the clothing is just par for the course.”

“What did you settle on?”

“That we were having a prayer session at college, and we each had to bring our own blanket to sit on to allow God adequate space between us,” Lane said. Rory didn’t have to look at her to see her grin.

The edge of Stars Hollow always surprised her; one second she was driving past Luis Baker’s house where she threw up in the third grade, the next it was only trees and the occasional oddly shaped field.

“Don’t peek,” Lane told her.

Rory was caught between reminding Lane that they’d seen each other naked before, probably dozens of times by now, and why should it be any different now, and well — an immediate, terrible instinct to want to peek. She settled on mumbling something about how she was driving, but _did_ check to see if she could see anything in the rear view mirror. Nada. Just as well.

The little park wasn’t far, maybe two or three miles outside of the town limits, and even with all the turns and weird thirty mile per hour zones seemingly randomly dispersed through the country roads, it wasn’t long before she was turning down the little lane half-obscured from the road with a little too much underbrush, and then the parking lot that had probably once been graveled, but now was mostly dirt. They’d been right in picking it; no one else was there.

“All set?” Rory asked.

“I need like one extra minute,” Lane said, with a little laugh. 

“I’ll go on ahead,” Rory told her, scooping up the bag of food and getting out of the car.

The park was pretty, in a mundane sort of way. It was mostly green space, with a sad little swing set and a community space, all concrete and full of tables on one side, on the other were a couple of massive oaks, with knotty roots, with a horseshoe pit off behind it. She couldn’t see the path, but knew from visiting here with her mom a few times a summer from ages six to twelve, that there were a couple different hiking paths off behind the swing set, and another more direct path somewhere back behind the trees, that would both lead down to another little grassy area along the side of a thin little river, that Rory had distinct, vivid memories of wading in as a child, and all the red and blue stones that coated the bottom, flat and rounded from being part of the river for so long.

She’d never, then or more recently, until the conversation she and Lane had had the other day, wondered if she might be gay, and she’d never had a crush on her best friend, despite understanding that she was pretty in an abstract sort of way. But that didn’t matter much when she felt Lane tuck her hand at her elbow and turned to see her in a little yellow dress with a white cardigan thrown over it, bright and pretty; it still took Rory’s breath away.

“I should’ve dressed up more!” were the words that came out of Rory’s mouth instead of a compliment.

“No!” Lane laughed. “You look good; I’ve always liked that sweater.”

“I almost wore that floral brown dress, with the ruffles,” Rory said, gesturing at her shoulders. It was a cute dress, but it still wasn’t as cute as what Lane was wearing.

“I would have been less over-dressed, then,” Lane agreed with a smile. “It doesn’t matter, though.”

“I think it does, though,” Rory said — she’d been reading anything she could find that might give her more information about this whole thing. “Does that make me like, the butch?” She wasn’t sure she was using that word right; she also felt sort of like she might be saying a slur, and felt weird about that as well.

She wished this wasn’t such uncharted territory, or that she had studied more. Or both.

“I don’t think it works that way,” Lane said, guiding her forward a little. “But, you can totally be more butch if you want. You might look good with really short hair.”

Rory nodded, jolted out of spiraling by the few steps forward they’d taken. And also, Lane was probably right, it didn’t matter. “I don’t know if I have the face, for short hair,” Rory said with a frown, though she wasn’t as panicked by the conversation as she had been a few minutes ago.

“No? I think you could pull it off if you wanted to,” Lane said with a little laugh.

They laid out the picnic blanket and the food and sat down next to each other. Lane gushed about how good the food was, and stole some of Rory’s lemonade when she drank hers too fast.

And it was nice — nearly idyllic — beneath one of the massive oaks, breeze dipping in gentle to kiss their faces in the autumn sun. Rory found herself appreciating the time one on one with Lane; while they often hung out together alone, there was something special and more purposeful to the feeling of hanging out outside of town. A level of _not being watched_ that Rory felt very aware of.

But it was — as much as it very much had the trappings of a date, in the increased intimacy, and that Rory had picked Lane up, and that they were one on one, and that they’d dressed up and had complimented each other, it still just felt, well, more or less like every other time she’d hung out with Lane. It just felt like hanging out together.

She said as much to Lane.

“You know,” she said, tucking her hair behind an ear. “I was thinking the same thing. It’s a well-planned date, don’t get me wrong, much more effectively executed than previous picnic dates I’d planned — like, that one with Henry Cho, awful in practice.”

“He didn’t even show up,” Rory remembered.

“ _And_ I found out that day that he’d asked someone else to prom,” Lane said, shaking her head. “This is both much better than that and much more date-like. However, I have spent many hours with you previously sitting on the grass that were not date-like and I think that’s messing with the intended outcome a little.”

Rory sighed and flopped backwards onto the picnic blanket. She felt the same. Maybe this had been a stupid idea — she wasn’t even sure she _liked_ girls, and here she was attempting to date her best friend to see if she might? It seemed silly now that she’d stopped to think about it a little; maybe she —

Lane said something that broke her train of thought.

“What did you just say?” Rory asked.

Lane grinned, but looked a little embarrassed, twisting one of the buttons on her cardigan between her fingers. “I said, that maybe we have to kiss? To make it feel like a date?”

Rory’s brain, usually so full of both quips and factual information, felt like a slate wiped clean. “What?” she managed.

“I know you heard me this time,” Lane said with a laugh. Rory searched her face for any indication that she might be messing with her — or that she might be panicking about this as much as Rory now was. If either was true, she was hiding it very well. “I can see it on your face.”

“I — I’ve only kissed boys before,” Rory stammered out.

“I mean, yeah, I figured. Same here,” Lane said with a little laugh. “I — I mean, don’t you want to see what it’s like? Lots of people do this, even if they’re not gay, right? They like, practice kissing their friends?”

“How are you so chill about this?” Rory asked her. She felt like suddenly she’d looked back and instead of the shoreline being _right there_ , it was barely a blip in the distance; much further than she thought and probably too far to swim to.

Lane shrugged a shoulder. “I don’t know, really. I mean, I’ve been thinking about it for a little longer than you, so maybe that helps. And it also — reading that article almost felt, like, a realization, you know? Like, it wasn’t just like, here’s this thing you’ve never thought about; it was like — here’s this thing you’ve never thought about, that now that you’re thinking about it, it’s all you can think about, and _also_ it feels a little like a puzzle piece you’d forgotten was missing.”

“Forgotten was missing?” Rory asked her.

Lane nodded. “But I’m delighted to have found.”

Rory wasn’t sure this experiment was like a missing puzzle piece for her, and it certainly hadn’t been a realization or anything either. But that didn’t mean it felt wrong — it was more like an option she’d never realized was available to her. And that didn’t mean she wasn’t curious. And if Lane was offering —

She nodded. Lane laughed and scooted a little closer on the blanket.

“Do you think this is going to be weird?” Rory asked.

“Maybe a little,” Lane said, with a little nod.

Rory wasn’t sure which one of them started leaning in first, and it was just as difficult to tell which of them closed the rest of the gap between them. There was no — precedence for the feeling of Lane’s lips on hers, it was so unlike all the kisses she’d had with any of the boys she’d dated. So much softer, so tinged with familiarity, and so — filled with something more, the littlest _zip_ of electricity, the sweetness of Lane’s strawberry lip gloss. Rory felt dizzy with the kiss. And it was too soon when Lane pulled away to assess, looking Rory in the eyes.

Rory felt a little like she’d had the wind knocked out of her. And she thought that maybe if she hadn’t had a crush on Lane growing up — she almost certainly did now.

“What are you thinking?” Lane asked, eyebrows raising.

Rory couldn’t hold back her smile as she suggested, “Maybe we have to kiss again?”


End file.
